Everyone who has a CHEMISTRY BACKGROUND in this forum should attempt to reachout to Malcom Mcleod
Contact | CAHMA
https://theconversation.com/profiles/malcolm-mcleod-1371768 .
I would like the messages to be as professional from an academic standpoint and less of a I do drugs, these drugs are off please help me 5000 miles away. And more of we are a group of scientists, chemists, "drug testing collation online" ,concerned citizens, etc. I also feel we could best explain with OUR NMR/MALDI/GC-MS results, theories, etc. Without clogging up his email needlessly. And basically just asking him we need as many NMR results and X-Ray diffraction analysis (XRD) or similar if possible to interpret as possible because.... GC/MS at energy control or private universities lab, FTIR at GYTD and ramen and paperspray mass spec and UVIC show high purity etc. But when some of those high purity samples were subjected to NMR at the private university lab we saw dimmers, MDP2Pol etc I think, while only the single "magic batch" had a clean NMR etc. etc. ? Hell if possible, they might not have to read it for us, but if enough of us chime in maybe they will tackle this WITH U maybe some aussies are here and can reachout in person with meh. I'm sure we have enough volunteers or I guess I could always bribe the person who did the first results to read some of them off.
I have in the mean time have attempted to get backing thru a few friends and generous donators online for Getyourdrugstest.com to get funding for an NMR machine, either one that does or doesnt use consumables IE Liquid nitrogen or helium to keep the magnets cool, said we can obtain funding for a Burnker NMR right away but if you would like something else please let us know , I found a full running system that used consumables for 10k on ebay free deliverly to CAD TO CAD but never heard a response back after a VERY heavy starting donation by myself and I def knew a few other people willing to drop a few k each... .... if they were interested . Anyways I have 2 ideas.
The first and why is to reach out to them/him and say Getyourdrugstested.com is not inserted in a donated NMR at this time. Either because the time to run the test is slow, the cost is "too high" or that, "FTIR, Ramen and paper spray mass spec are good enough," even though I had a batch of "tested FXE with FTIR, RAMEN and paperspray mass spec" FXE that is 100% probably Can-ket... what is can-ket... the same drug they discovered with NMR details below and why I figured we should reach out as someone who can help us!
Malcolm McLeod is a chemist with research interests in analytical and organic chemistry. He serves as the scientific advisor to Pill Testing Australia and Directions Health Services. He leads the team of chemists conducting analysis at the CanTEST pilot, Australia's first fixed site drug checking service supported by the ACT Government.
The CanTEST Health and Drug Checking Service is operated by Directions Health Services and CAHMA with technical assistance from Pill Testing Australia. This is a free service their contact details are in the link below
Story of (CAN-KET 2F-NENDCK). As 2’-fluoro-2-oxo-phenylcyclohexylethylamine is a bit of a mouthful, our team has taken to calling it CanKet, as in “Canberra ketamine and why WE should reachout
An entirely new illicit drug has been discovered by Australian chemists. Here’s how they did it. After this feat of chemical analysis, we are now able to identify CanKet with impunity and GYTD and UVIC cant detect it still... most FXE is canket anyways
One of them (sold as FXE) was sent to drugs data and was returned as an (to me) obvious intermediate/precursor:
This doesn't strictly answer your question but FXE (3'-Fluoro-2-oxo-PCE) has never actually existed on the grey market. Everything sold as FXE is actually 'CanKet' (2'-Fluoro-2-oxo-PCE). Apart from your example which seems to be some random precursor?
In 2022 some Ketamine samples tested by CanTest in Australia didn't quite match any known substance. They eventually found it was 2'-Fluoro-2-oxo-PCE, which had never been sold on the grey market or described in any literature. (This article goes over how:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/canket-analytical-chemistr/).
Once analytical standards were made available in 2023 Drugsdata realized that every 'FXE' sample they had ever tested actually matched Canket. They released a statement retroactively stating that all positive FXE tests were actually CanKet. To this day they have never seen any FXE. See statement
https://drugsdata.org/view.php?id=13636
Apr 27 2023: This sample was originally reported as containing Fluorexetamine (3-Fluoro-2-oxo PCE). A certified reference standard became available for 2-Fluoro-2-oxo PCE in early 2023.
All samples analyzed by the DrugsData lab prior to early 2023 that were reported as containing Fluorexetamine have been reexamined in comparison to this new standard. They have all been retroactively revised; they all contain 2-Fluoro-2-oxo PCE, including this sample. To date, no samples tested by DrugsData have contained 3-Fluoro-2-oxo PCE.
Imagine, if you will, a small plastic baggy containing a mixture of crystals and powder.
The person presenting it thinks “it might be ketamine?”, but admits the subjective effects are different to what they’re used to. How do we find out if it’s what they think it is? And what are the consequences if it isn’t?
This is a typical scenario for the people working at
CanTEST – Australia’s first and only fixed-site, face-to-face drug checking service, located in Canberra.
And in this case, it led chemists to discover a drug never before seen in Australia, and with no associated clinical information from anywhere in the world.
The identification of
new psychoactive substances – drugs made to resemble established illicit drugs – presents a major challenge when pill-testing. Testing a chemical provides us with its “fingerprint” that will hopefully match one of the thousands stored in databases available to analysts.
But what happens when a fingerprint doesn’t provide a match and we have come across “chemical X”?
That brings us back to the original baggy of powder.
Patrick Yates, a PhD candidate from the Australian National University’s Research School of Chemistry, ran the sample through the first piece of equipment, the Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer – a workhorse of many drug-checking programs around the world.
FTIR works quickly and reliably – even at a
bush doof – as long as an electricity supply is available. It shines a laser on the sample, and the “reflection” (a measure of how the drug shakes and wiggles) is captured and compared to a database of more than 30,000 chemicals.
Patrick’s analysis didn’t confirm a ketamine match, but suggested it might be a relatively new ketamine analogue called
2-fluorodeschloroketamine (2-FDCK). However, Patrick’s trained intuition left him doubtful.
PhD student Cassidy Whitefield then turned to an instrument known as ultra-high performance liquid chromatography with photodiode array (UPLC-PDA), humming away in the corner at CanTEST. She ran lab-based standards through it, calibrating the machine to the ten most common drugs we see, including ketamine.
Chemical X had to “run a race” against a known sample, comparing it to already known compounds. The UPLC-PDA test takes about four minutes to run.
While the sample appeared similar to the ketamine standard, Cassie’s trained eye saw something was off. The rate at which chemical X ran its race (known as the retention time) was similar, but its absorption of ultraviolet radiation was off.
Whatever was there was real, quite pure, and neither ketamine nor 2-FDCK.
When in doubt, run more tests
Ketamine is both an invaluable agent in the emergency and pre-hospital environment, and part of an emerging group of illicit drugs known as
arylcyclohexamines.
In consultation with ANU chemistry professor Mal McLeod, the CanTEST team arrived at chemical X being “ketamine-like”.
The person who brought it in was advised the substance was
not ketamine, and its identity could not be ascertained – our band of peer workers advised extreme caution in using it.
But that was not the end of the story for analytical chemists – the full inquisition was just beginning.
Next up, chemical X was subjected to a method called gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS), meaning the sample was made to “run another race”, and was then smashed into pieces to further fingerprint it.
The GC-MS data correlated closely with a ketamine derivative known as
fluorexetamine, but the presence of an isomer – two compounds with the same molecular formula but arranged differently – could not be ruled out.
It was time to bring out the big guns: a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer is a chemist’s Book of Runes. Answers can be found, but only by those few who can speak the language well.
Eventually, after a series of multi-dimensional tests, the team figured out there were four hydrogens next to each other around the aromatic ring, meaning it could
not be fluorexetamine.
Chemical X could
only be something called 2’-fluoro-2-oxo-phenylcyclohexylethylamine. And they had never seen this compound before.
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From chemical X to ‘CanKet’
It’s hard to emphasise what a phenomenal piece of work this was. We contacted our offsiders at the UN Office of Drug Control, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, as well as several well-positioned researchers in this space from around the world. None had seen the compound before.
Our colleagues at the ACT Government Analytical Laboratory wrote to their international peers; a global forum of forensic and analytical chemists reviewed their locally acquired data and provided information that supported our findings.
We have since found a single further report out of China from a forensically obtained analytical sample, where it was described by another name (2F-NENDCK). As 2’-fluoro-2-oxo-phenylcyclohexylethylamine is a bit of a mouthful, our team has taken to calling it CanKet, as in “Canberra ketamine”.
After this feat of chemical analysis, we are now able to identify CanKet with impunity. We still don’t know its full effects, but thanks to understanding its chemical composition, we have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.
YET GYTD and UVIC miss it? These are the peeps we need on our side...
The discovery of Canberra Ketamine was briefly quite an interesting mystery, it seemed like a dissociative had been invented solely to satisfy our sparsely populated island. Turns out someone was just buying a bunch of "FXE" and distributing it as K (Real K was hard to find then and cost $200+/g so it made financial sense to sell RC's. Tiletamine was also common).
It was a matter of everyone including drugsdata taking the manufacturers word at face value. Not many people seem to be aware of this, the only post I've seen discussing how FXE never actually existed had like .
